Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Hertz Hurts - How NOT to do Customer Service

According to its Mission Statement, Hertz strives to be the "most customer focused rental company in every market [they] serve." Recently, FoIB Bill M had the opportunity to put this to the test.

Hertz failed. Miserably:

"On March 3, my daughter rented a car from Hertz in Lafayette, IN. Upon renting she asked about adding me (her father) as a driver. She was told (in this technology age) that she and I would have to be there at the same time (inconvenient as I live in Ohio). When she was informed of this, the Hertz rep assured my daughter that we could stop at any Hertz together and they could take care of it.

I then called two different Hertz locations in Dayton and they told me the same thing. However, when we stopped at the Wayne Ave location in Dayton the rep said she could not access our information. She was helpful in contacting the Lafayette Hertz and asking them to fax down a form which we signed and she faxed back for us. They also finally mentioned that there would be an additional $ 13.00 charge per day for me to be able to drive the car (this was the first time we were informed of this). I attempted to call Hertz customer service to discuss this and bailed on the call after 25 minutes on my cell with no live person yet.

On the 4th day of our trip the Service Engine light came on. After a 20 minute phone call, we finally spoke to a gentleman at Hertz who told us to stop at any Hertz location (apparently a favorite lie told to customers) and we could trade it in for another model to continue our trip. Being wiser from the first try we called several locations, and were told that this was not true (surprise!), and that we needed to go to the Airport Location (out of our way and extremely inconvenient). After a 2 hour good faith attempt to help Hertz, we gave up and decided to drive it back to Lafayette IN (hoping that the vehicle didn't blow up in the meantime).

Needless to say Hertz will not be on our radar to rent from in the future: horrible customer experience. Next time, we'll take our busuiness to a company that actually cares about doing the right thing."

Thanks, Bill, for sharing that - hopefully it will save our readers from a similar fate.